Political Observer comments.

As well argued as it is, Mr. Robin essay fails to look at the fact that, if I have the cash, to make a donation to the Supreme Court ‘charity’, I can purchase an audience with a Supreme Court Judge. What might that mean? Corruption is a fact of the life of the Supreme Court?

What might Minding the Law by Anthony G. Amsterdam and Jerome Bruner offer? a pathbreaking approach to Jurisprudential Interpretation ?

In this remarkable collaboration, one of the nation’s leading civil rights lawyers joins forces with one of the world’s foremost cultural psychologists to put American constitutional law into an American cultural context. By close readings of key Supreme Court opinions, they show how storytelling tactics and deeply rooted mythic structures shape the Court’s decisions about race, family law, and the death penalty.

Minding the Law explores crucial psychological processes involved in the work of lawyers and judges: deciding whether particular cases fit within a legal rule (“categorizing”), telling stories to justify one’s claims or undercut those of an adversary (“narrative”), and tailoring one’s language to be persuasive without appearing partisan (“rhetorics”). Because these processes are not unique to the law, courts’ decisions cannot rest solely upon legal logic but must also depend vitally upon the underlying culture’s storehouse of familiar tales of heroes and villains.

But a culture’s stock of stories is not changeless. Anthony G. Amsterdam and Jerome Bruner argue that culture itself is a dialectic constantly in progress, a conflict between the established canon and newly imagined “possible worlds.” They illustrate the swings of this dialectic by a masterly analysis of the Supreme Court’s race-discrimination decisions during the past century.

A passionate plea for heightened consciousness about the way law is practiced and made, Minding the Law will be welcomed by a new generation concerned with renewing law’s commitment to a humane justice.

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674008168

My copy is dated 2000. A review in the Los Angeles Times of Sunday ,December 17, 2000, by Edward Lazarus, titled ‘Sorting It Out’ still acts as my book mark.

Mr. Robin offers – its almost Marxian, of a sort ?

Perhaps, taking a page from Clarence Thomas, we can pursue a different path. If money is speech that secures outsized influence and access for the wealthiest citizens, maybe the problem is not the presence of money in politics but the distribution of money in the economy.

As radical as that claim may sound today, it has been the heart and soul of democratic argument since the founding of the republic. Noah Webster, of American dictionary fame, claimed in 1790 that “the basis of a democratic and a republican form of government is a fundamental law favoring an equal or rather a general distribution of property.” Without that equal distribution of wealth and power, “liberty expires.”

If money is speech, the implication for democracy is clear. There can be no democracy in the political sphere unless there is equality in the economic sphere. That is the real lesson of Clarence Thomas.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/18/clarence-thomas-scandal-corruption-00092335

StephenKMackSD

On this vexing question:

…when liberal titans William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall co-authored the Buckley decision, which held that campaign expenditures are in fact speech — progressives have sought to reverse the oligarchic turn of American society by getting money out of politics.

If a Jurist is to become a viable candidate for the Supreme Court, she/he must be Capitalist Friendly!

April 19, 2023: Some further thoughts:

Is Mr. Robin ‘playing it safe’ by not expanding his critique of Clarence Thomas’ corruption, to the rest of the Court? Bill Blum of Truth Dig offers this on John Roberts’ ‘Annual Report’:

Headline: Chief Justice Roberts’ Annual Report on the Federal Judiciary Is a Study in Hypocrisy

Sub-headline: A Supreme Court ritual ignores a crisis of legitimacy.

On Dec. 31, 2022, John Roberts, the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, released his annual report on the state of the federal judiciary. The report is a yearly ritual in which the head of the high tribunal provides a statistical summary of the number of cases filed in the federal courts during the previous 12 months, and in which the chief typically extols the virtues of the men and women who staff the third branch of our national government. 

This year’s report, however, made no mention of the court’s current crisis of legitimacy, which was greatly aggravated by its decision last term rescinding the federal constitutional right to abortion. Nor did Roberts discuss the urgent need for the court to adopt a code of ethics to prevent the justices from engaging in rampant conflicts of interest, such as those involving Justice Clarence Thomas and his right-wing activist spouse Ginni Thomas.

… 

Chief Justice Roberts’ Annual Report on the Federal Judiciary Is a Study in Hypocrisy

Mr. Bloom also offers this telling critique of The Supreme Court

Headline: Part II: It Will Take a Political Movement to Reform a Politicized Supreme Court

Sub-headline: It is time to revive Franklin Roosevelt’s court-expansion plan in defense of democracy and the rule of law.

The radical right’s long crusade to capture the Supreme Court is over. Anyone who doesn’t realize this hasn’t been paying attention, or has imbibed the Kool-Aid served by Chief Justice John Roberts at his 2005 Senate confirmation hearing, when he promised to work as a neutral arbiter on the bench much like a baseball umpire, calling only “balls and strike, and not to pitch or bat.”

Instead of minding the strike zone, Roberts and his Republican confederates old and new have changed the rules of the game in a concerted effort to drive the country backward. Under the aegis of the regressive legal theory of “originalism” (see Part I of this series), they have issued a blistering succession of reactionary rulings on voting rights, gerrymandering, union organizing, the death penalty, environmental protection, gun control, abortion, campaign finance, and the use of dark money in politics. Before the court’s current term concludes at the end of June, it likely will wreak more havoc in a series of pending cases on “religious liberty” and LGBTQ discrimination, affirmative action, student-debt forgiveness, and, once again, voting rights.

The court is at war with democracy and modernity. It must be stopped.

…

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/part-ii-it-will-take-a-political-movement-to-reform-a-politicized-supreme-court/

Political Observer

Old Socialist engages in ‘waste management’.

@RColvile opens with these two paragraphs:

It is one of the most extraordinary statistics in British politics. Unless Rishi Sunak hurries to the polls, the next election will take place a full 50 years since any Labour leader not called Tony Blair beat the Tories. No wonder Sir Keir Starmer has been taking large chunks from the Blair playbook — moving to the centre, talking tough on crime, wooing business, committing to spending restraint and, above all, infuriating his party’s left wing.

Of course, there are a few differences between the two. Blair was by far the more gifted performer. His poll leads were larger. He never accused John Major of being soft on paedophiles — the charge levelled against Sunak in a bizarre attack ad the other week. It was all the odder given that Starmer, as director of public prosecutions, helped set the guidelines his party was denouncing, at a time when his rival wasn’t even an MP.

As Mrs. Thatcher remarked ‘Blair was her greatest accomplishment’

I’ll quote from Colevile’s collection of unadorned ‘Labour Left’ exhumations. This Times propagandist, hasn’t bothered with the inconvenient ‘The Labour Files’, as demonstrative of an utterly corrupt Political Class!

But there is still a shred of consolation for the Labour left — and a warning for any Tories tempted to think warmly of a restorative spell in opposition.

Now Starmer is very obviously no Jeremy Corbyn. For one thing, he is qualified to be prime minister. For another, he is not as viscerally tribal.

But Starmer is also very obviously no Blair. After the 2001 election, a veteran backbencher asked the great helmsman whether they could finally drop the New Labour stuff and do what they actually believed in.

Like Blair, Starmer is tacking to the centre on policy. Labour is busy setting out its “five missions”, which appear to involve matching some lofty goal — the highest growth rate in the G7, restoring the reputation of Britain’s police forces — to a series of worthy but inadequate policy solutions. (A task force on supply chain needs, tough penalties for fly-tippers and so on.)

But unlike Blair, there are clear limits. Many of Starmer’s policies are still to the left of anything contemplated by Blair or Gordon Brown —…

Labour is committed to continuity on tax and spend, and to accepting the Brexit verdict. But that is emphatically out of electoral necessity rather than conviction. Angela Rayner —…

You may retort that the reason Labour hasn’t accommodated itself to the Conservative record since 2010 is that it has been so much less impressive than Thatcher’s.

There is absolutely no sign, in other words, that Starmer and co have made an intellectual journey like Blair.

The fact that he has repudiated pretty much all of this out of electoral expediency — to the justifiable fury of the hard left — doesn’t change the fact that he said it. Or that he served under Corbyn, and campaigned for him to be prime minister, when more scrupulous figures stepped back.

What is Labour’s view on phonics, the curriculum, free schools? It says it wants to build, but where and how? Does it still view planning reform as a “developer’s charter”? Does it share Joe Biden’s vision of business policy as a form of woke corporatism where you lavish firms with investment incentives, but only as long as they recognise unions and commit to a host of quotas on diversity, equity and inclusion?

At the moment, Starmer is promising to govern as the technocratic scourge of the fly-tippers, his time as a Corbynite shield-bearer dismissed as the youthful folly of his, er, mid-fifties.

Starmer has been ruthless in weeding out Corbynite parliamentary candidates. But people who want to be Labour MPs still tend to be pretty left-wing.

Over the past few weeks, the polls have started to shift in Sunak’s direction. But Starmer is absolutely in pole position to become the next prime minister — especially if the SNP continues its implosion. It is time to talk less about whether he can win, and more about what he will do if he does.

Viewed in isolation these fragments of @RColvile’s essay use of catch words, phrases, as I have indicated by placing these in bold font, is pure Thatcherite political hysteria mongering. With Corbyn and his proffered fellow travelers, and even Joe Biden, as like political actors, in Colevile’s wan Political Melodrama.

Old Socialist

Political Observer comments.

Headline: French Diplomacy Undercuts U.S. Efforts to Rein China In

Sub-headline: Allies don’t always see things the same way, as Emmanuel Macron’s cozy visit to Xi Jinping made abundantly clear.

Macron has shown something resembling political independence from the American Hegemon ? The Reader might look to the Full Scale Rebellion against Macron’s raising the Retirement Age, was it a political mistake to bypass the Senate? as part of a ‘why’ of Macron’s seeming independence, of action and words, involving China- a maladroit attempt at changing the subject ?

In a scant 1.211 words Mr. Cohen offers what will be a provisional framing, of the issue, of the subsequent and evolving Party Line, of the respectable cadre of Corporate Media Technocrats?

President Emmanuel Macron of France complimented China’s top leader on the “very fragrant tea.” President Xi Jinping recalled “taking notes in order to understand” when he visited his father, then governor of the southeastern Guangdong province, in 1978. He also observed, extolling Chinese economic development, that the province now has “four cities with more than 10 million people.”

It was an exchange of remarkable intimacy, the two leaders, tieless, sharing pleasantries in what was once the official residence of Mr. Xi’s father. The conversation came at the end of a three-day visit by Mr. Macron that was notable for the exceptional attention showered on him, and for the commitment in a concluding joint statement to a “global strategic partnership.”

What exactly that will mean — beyond the commitments to the development of civilian nuclear power stations, the transition to carbon-neutral economies, sales of Europe’s Airbus aircraft and the promotion of pork exports — is not altogether clear.

But at a time when Sino-American relations are in a deep freeze, Mr. Macron staked out an independent European position, and both leaders repeatedly lauded a “multipolar world,” thinly disguised code for one that is not American dominated.

…

Mr. Cohn repeats political commonplace’s in his opening paragraphs: the New York Times is the voice of the American Government: ‘All the news that’s fit to print’ was once the motto of this Newspaper. Mr. Cohn repeats ‘the conventional wisdom’ and or offers a reconstruction of that wisdom.

The visit, overall, said a loud “No” to the economic “decoupling” favored by the United States as a means to reduce security risks through sweeping export controls and reordered supply chains. It delicately balanced Western and Chinese views on the war in Ukraine without achieving any breakthrough. It was singularly quiet on China’s threat to Taiwan.

Above all, in a new phase of history, one where the United States faces in China a competitor stronger than any it has confronted since becoming the world’s dominant power, Mr. Macron’s embrace of a Chinese partnership suggested that the battle underway to preserve the liberal institutions of the postwar order against an assault from Beijing and Moscow will be complex and nuanced. Not all of America’s allies look at it in the same way.

Through multiple allusions to the need to “reinvent an international order of peace and stability,” Mr. Macron appeared to inch France closer to the Chinese view that the world is undergoing “changes that haven’t happened in 100 years,” as Mr. Xi put it at the end of a warm visit to Moscow last month, even as the French leader hews to the American view that many of those changes are malign and must be resisted.

The Reader arrives at 399 words that ends here ‘ … even as the French leader hews to the American view that many of those changes are malign and must be resisted.’ Further diagnosis of Macron’s deviationism, and his dissent on ‘Russia’s war against Ukraine’, “a manifest violation of international law, a country deciding to colonize its neighbor.”.

“In the context of a deepening Cold War with China, this shows that Macron definitely wants to go against the tide,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a political scientist at Hong Kong Baptist University. Mr. Macron, he said, was playing “the Gaullist card,” a reference to Charles de Gaulle’s bristling assertion of independence from the United States once World War II was won.

Mr. Macron, while appearing to embrace aspects of China’s worldview, was unequivocal about Russian aggression. He told students at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou that they should be worried about the state of the world. The main reason, he suggested, was Russia’s war against Ukraine, “a manifest violation of international law, a country deciding to colonize its neighbor.”

Some deft pruning of Mr. Cohen Foreign Policy chatter, reveals what that provisional framing offers to likeminded Technocrats?

At the same time, Mr. Macron accepted several terms that China included in its 12-point proposal for the “political settlement of the Ukraine crisis,” issued in February and dismissed by the United States. 

Among them were the need for “a balanced, effective and sustainable European security architecture” and the need to prevent “bloc confrontation,” which the Chinese regard as reflecting a “Cold War mentality.” 

Because Europe’s current security architecture is built around NATO, the assertion that a new, balanced one is needed implicitly questions the Atlantic alliance. 

In exchange, Mr. Macron and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, who traveled with him, secured a vague undertaking from Mr. Xi that he would speak to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine at some unspecified date.

A little over a year ago, a couple of weeks before the war in Ukraine started, Mr. Macron traveled to Moscow to meet Mr. Putin at either end of a very long table in the Kremlin.

Mr. Putin’s words proved worthless. 

Whether Mr. Xi is serious about talking to Mr. Zelensky, and whether China can offer any effective mediation to end the war, will become clear over the coming months.

Another priority, however, as Mr. Macron’s visit made clear, is wooing Europe and ensuring that American “decoupling” does not also become European.

The Chinese economy has been hard hit.

On the issue of the island democracy of Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory in increasingly bellicose terms, Mr. Macron was notably reticent.

The final communiqué reaffirmed the commitment of France to a “One China” policy — that mainland China and Taiwan make up a single nation.

Within hours of Mr. Macron’s departure early Saturday, China announced that it would conduct three days of military drills around Taiwan.

The drills underscore the current fraught state of Sino-American relations. Since the cancellation of a visit to China by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in February, caused by a clash over a Chinese spy balloon that flew over the United States, no high-level meetings have taken place, and none are planned. 

As they sipped tea at his father’s former residence on Friday, Mr. Xi said to Mr. Macron: “If you stay longer, you are welcome to live here.” 

The sentences and paragraphs acting as singularities, can become riffs on the ideas, themes, postulations, by Mr. Cohen, that offers much to the writer of Foreign Policy Chatter, to adapt as need arises.

Political Observer

Queer Atheist confronts an ‘Old World Thinker’.

Headline: Militant unions thrive in a weaker society

Sub-headline: Extremism is increasing as economic and political objectives merge with the culture wars

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/militant-unions-thrive-in-a-weaker-society-5nh536ddv

Let me begin with these paragraphs steeped in political paranoia:

Teachers, civil servants, nurses, transport workers and others have been mounting months of strike action, variously causing disruption, misery and harm to the public.

Ostensibly, this is being driven by pay restraint, cutbacks and inflation causing distressing rises in the cost of living. However, while this may be the motivation for some strikers, it’s not the only reason. More radical agendas are at work. For starters, there is an explicit aim to bring down the whole political order. Last October, Frances O’Grady, then the general secretary of the TUC, told its annual conference: “The Tories are now toxic. It’s time for change.” In February, a leaked memo revealed that members of the RMT union, who have been mounting rolling transport strikes, told their leader, Mick Lynch, to do more to speed up “the suppression of the capitalist system by a socialistic order of society”. This kind of trade union militancy was last seen in the Seventies and Eighties. So why has it resurfaced now?

Like Mrs. Thatcher, Melanie Phillips: ‘who has championed traditional values in the culture war for more than three decades.’ are political/moral conservatives always in search for the destructive political non-conformists, in sum The Left, her diagnosis of the problem is shopworn paranoia!

The short answer is that the unions are taking advantage of a cultural and political vacuum that has been deepening for years. There has been a profound loss of trust in the entire constitutional order. To many people, if not most, politicians of all parties appear rudderless and unprincipled. The bonds of nation, inherited culture and normative values that once held everyone together have been shattered. Now, warring tribes snipe at each other from either side of a political chasm.

She paraphrases Professor Matthew Goodwin’s book Values, Voice and Virtue.

In his new book Values, Voice and Virtue, Professor Matthew Goodwin argues persuasively that politics is being driven by a “new elite” composed of the professional, educated middle classes who wield immense economic, cultural and political power. Committed to universal laws and institutions, they no longer believe elections matter much any more. The rest of the public has been left effectively disenfranchised. More than half the population now think no party represents their priorities and values. As Goodwin observes, “populist” revolts took place against this new elite through the Brexit vote and the election of Boris Johnson as prime minister. However, there has been another outcome: the draining of authority from parliament to groups wielding cultural, social or economic power over others.

How very convenient that Mr. Goodwin’s book Values, Voice and Virtue was reviewed in the TLS of March 31, 2023 :

Melanie Phillips, with the bit between her teeth, proceeds at full gallop …

This has led to the emergence of a ruthless militant agenda among trade unions and other groups that have seized their chance. While the Labour Party has freed itself from its capture by the hard left under Jeremy Corbyn, militancy and power have flowed from mainstream politics into the trade unions and other groups, fuelling the rise of street politics, which many now believe has greater legitimacy than representative democracy. The anti-capitalist Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter and the eco-warriors have all promoted mass-based political action from below. Last October, protesters took to the streets in more than 50 towns and cities in simultaneous protests co-ordinated among multiple groups and trade unions, including Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion and the Revolutionary Communist Group, to maximise their impact.

There is a still more profound agenda driving this turmoil. Economic and political objectives are merging with the culture wars. This is all too visible in the civil service. Formerly crucial in keeping the show on the road regardless of the manifold inadequacies of elected politicians, civil servants are fast becoming synonymous with incompetence, ideological brainwashing and politicised obstruction. Last year ministers accused Whitehall of having “a political agenda to erase women and the concept of biological sex” with its deployment of non-specific language.

The final paragraph of this hysterical screed is predictable. I’ve highlighted one of the sentences warning of ‘ destroying the normative values of society’ and other expressions of doom and gloom– the world is changing, in frightening dramatic leaps, and Melanie Phillips is in a panic, about that Old World’s waning imperatives: political, moral, and sexual have reached, if not it’s terminus, or one of its many dénouements?

Piling the preposterous on the reprehensible, the National Education Union has said that drag queens and LGBT+ authors should be invited into schools to make them more inclusive. This would help to challenge the “heteronormative culture and curriculum that dominates education”. So this has nothing to do with inclusion and everything to do with destroying the normative values of society. Democratic governance is based upon mutual respect, shared goals and civil liberties. Under the sanctimonious pretence of inclusion and empowerment, this is being replaced by coercion, threats and bullying as political, cultural and moral boundaries are smashed. It’s Britain’s post-democracy moment.

Queer Atheist

Myra Breckinridge reads selected portions…

Headline: 8 Years in Trump Prison, and Still Waiting on Parole

Son of Wm. F. Buckley Jr. is now billed as a ‘a novelist and a humorist’ : what reader can forget ‘Thank You for Smoking’ of 1994?

The opening paragraphs of his latest ‘essay’ doesn’t demonstrate ‘humor’, but untalented chatter, perfect for The New York Times Readers, at their breakfast tables?

On Monday, a friend breathlessly and sheepishly emailed: “Yes, I admit it: I’m watching the motorcade from LaGuardia to Trump Tower. It’s like O.J.’s Bronco ride! And I swear, the lead car in the motorcade looks like a white Bronco! Could this be an inside joke by the N.Y.P.D.?”

As delicious — indeed, bewitching — a possibility as this might be, I found myself shrugging. I didn’t watch the motorcade, nor could I watch the arraignment, though long have I fantasized about seeing Donald Trump perp-walked, mug-shot, fingerprinted, shackled, summarily convicted and motorcaded directly from court to the South Street Seaport and put aboard a ship for St. Helena.

Why am I not jubilating, wallowing in a deep, warm bubble bath of schadenfreude? Why, instead of humming “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!” am I pressing buttons on the remote control to see what else is on — some politically themed movie, say, where the president more or less gracefully accepts proof of his villainy, resigns and helicopters off to exile in, say, California? Those were the days. Instead, what’s currently on more resembles “Groundhog Day,” a replay of a movie about replay.

Much as I hope to see justice served — if not, at this late point, piping hot — it feels as though we’re the ones who are already in jail. Mr. Trump came down that escalator into the lobby in 2015, making this the eighth year of our sentence in Trump Prison.

…

The Reader can thank her word count feature, that informs her that 686 words remain of this – what to name it? Father and Son were/are not talent-less word-smiths, amended by a kind of earnestness of execution, to express it in the most back-handed way. Now I could be wrong! when I read a paragraph like this, but the ‘Oh, the humanity!’ insertion blunts the power of his description.

Mr. Trump’s fame came largely from a reality TV show, every episode of which concluded with his snarling at someone and telling them they were fired. His genius was to make us participants in this garish melodrama. Though many of us — but, alas, apparently not enough of us — yearn fervently to fire him, he has proved unfireable. Teflon, Kevlar, whatever your metaphor for “unassailable” — he endures. The show is renewed for another season. The concept of becoming ridiculous and tiresome by “jumping the shark” does not apply. The bigger the shark, the higher the jump. On to the Capitol! Hang Mike Pence! — who was last heard bemoaning the “weaponization” of justice. Oh, the humanity!

Sincerely yours,

Myra Breckenridge

Old Socialist comments.

The Reader wonders where Ms. Tonnelier, was during all the ‘excitement’ , or even the promise of Neo-Liberalism, Macron Style! Framed as the highfalutin ‘Jupertarian Politics’. Tonnelier expresses her disillusionment, of a kind. Macronism was, is, and will always be, about the Public Relation’s savvy of a class of Technocrats, and their allies in the Press!

In America readers of that journalistic dinosaur ‘Time’ were regaled by with celebratory notion of Macron as the apostle ‘French Renewal’ . While the once editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, swooned over Macron, that rated front cover status, usually reserved for the latest ‘Movie Star’ on the rise, or more pointedly on the has-been on the ‘skids’. And or the lurid ‘True Crime Drama’ as reported by Dominick Dunne.

 Of the Early Macron now long forgotten, in the wake of his ‘Pension Reform’ and the full scale Rebellion… as The Middle Class finally pays attention, to what the gilets jaunes are/were about.

Headline: ‘The government’s amateurism on pensions contrasts with the efficiency Macron displayed in 2017’

Sub-headline: With the accumulation of political errors and technical mishaps, the presidential camp is losing its image of a party of reason, writes Audrey Tonnelier in her column.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/03/31/the-government-s-amateurism-on-pensions-contrasts-with-the-efficiency-macron-displayed-in-2017_6021271_23.html

Ms. Tonnelier’s expression of disillusionment. While Macrons ‘Jupertarian Politics’ expresses itself as utterly Anti-Democratic!

It is difficult to say at this point. Twelve months and 10 days of national protests on, the failure of the government to convince is obvious. Not only did the government fail in federating a solid political majority around its objective and choose to use Article 49.3 of the Constitution to pass the bill without a vote in Parliament, but it also appeared to be the one turning down the outstretched hand of the unions.

Last week, Macron lamented “that no one (…) proposed a compromise.” In doing so, he deprived himself of welcome support in a moment of unprecedented social tension.

There is more. Even before the clashes that followed the use of Article 49.3, errors of communication and other approximations on the substance of the reform were a feature of the political and parliamentary debates.

What is called for here, is a ruthless rhetorical pruning, as Ms. Tonnelier drones on…

…

But it soon became very difficult to distinguish the characteristics of the current and previous reforms and the public turned critical.

…

The controversy over the employment of older workers, a mathematical consequence of the raise of the retirement age according to some government members, before accompanying measures to support the hiring of people over 50 were discussed, made things even more complicated.

…

Finally, the allusive nature of an impact study of the reform on many aspects, starting with the “redistributive” facet of the bill – Who will benefit from the new bill and to what extent? – also contributed.

…

The utter failure of nerve, of political candor, in sum, of the cowardice of Ms. Tonnelier, to address Macron’s ‘Jupertarian Politics’ as the expression of Anti-Democratic Imperatives – yet foretold in her ‘the efficiency Macron displayed in 2017′ as a pre-apologetic?

Old Socialist

Political Observer comments.

The Reader confronts this from The Times:

Headline: Jeremy Corbyn could start a new party. Does he have the friends or funds?

Sub-headline: Talk of a run for London mayor is wide of the mark, but Corbyn’s exile may be the catalyst for a rival to Labour. It’s giving some of his long-time loyalists the jitters

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jeremy-corbyn-could-start-a-new-party-does-he-have-the-friends-or-funds-zk7m0b7js

Do the editors of the newspaper ‘think’ that their readership has forgotten this ‘book review’ by Dominic Sandbrook of Tom Bower’s book on Jeremy Corbyn?

Headline: Review: Dangerous Hero: Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power by Tom Bower — portrait of a monomaniac

Sub-headline: If Jeremy Corbyn became prime minister, he would easily be the most dangerous, most indolent and least intelligent holder of the office in history

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-dangerous-hero-corbyns-ruthless-plot-for-power-by-tom-bower-portrait-of-a-monomaniac-8x0spp3d8

This ‘book review’ was part of the campaign of hysterical defamation against Corbyn, carried out by the respectable Times. By the Dailey Mail’s Dominic Sandbrook, might The Reader see an emerging pattern? The headline and sub-headline give the game away, but an exploration of the ‘political diagnosis’ offered by Sandbrook via Bower is ‘damming’ …

This is one of the most depressing books I have ever read. It is a forensically detailed portrait of a man with no inner life, a monomaniac suffused with an overwhelming sense of his own righteousness, a private schoolboy who failed one A-level and got two Es in the others, a polytechnic dropout whose first wife never knew him to read a book.

It is the story of a man who does not appear to have gone to the cinema or listened to music, takes no interest in art or fashion and refused to visit Vienna’s magnificent Schönbrunn Palace because it was “royal”. It tells how he bitterly opposed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, deeply regretted the fall of the Berlin Wall and praised the men who attacked New York on September 11, 2001, for showing an “enormous amount of skill”. In some parallel universe, this man would currently be living in well-deserved obscurity. In reality, Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition and the bookmakers’ favourite to become our next prime minister.

Mr. Bower as ‘biographer’ described by Sandbrook …

For the veteran biographer Tom Bower, whose previous subjects include Mohamed al-Fayed, Richard Branson, Simon Cowell, Tony Blair and Prince Charles, Corbyn is the easiest target imaginable.

The Reader might look to Mr. Bower’s latest book on Meghan Markle, as ‘reviewed’ in The Telegraph… more of that ‘pattern’ emerging?

Headline: Unlike Oprah, Tom Bower’s unauthorised Meghan Markle biography will pull no punches

Sub-headline: After scathing books on Prince Charles, Robert Maxwell and Simon Cowell, the bloodhound of biography has a new target: the Duchess of Sussex

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/unlike-oprah-tom-bowers-unauthorised-biography-meghan-markle/?WT.mc_id=tmgoff_psc_ppc_us_news_performancemax_dsa&gclid=Cj0KCQjwz6ShBhCMARIsAH9A0qXfg80rFtwS295enWh9Se3TW6HAezAdi-1mq3I26w4yW0GO8PjXdfkaAhsyEALw_wcB

The Telegraph sub-headline sums up the ‘literary career’ of Tom Bower: ‘the bloodhound of biography’. A not very discreet way of naming opportunism

The Reader can explore, for herself, what I have presented, of this verifiable record of Anti-Corbyn Hysteria, and the part played by Sandbrook, Bower and The Times.

In this political moment of self -serving political amnesia, is the operative strategy of both Newspapers, Writers and Citizens: call it a survival strategy? This newspaper now presents itself as an ‘honest reporter’ ,on the future of Jeremy Corbyn in any context? Some quotation of this ‘news story’ by Patrick Maguire:

Patrick Maguire is Red Box editor for The Times. He is the co-author of Left Out, the authoritative history of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.

Penguin Books provides a quick summery of The Times’s political hack’s ‘History Made To Measure’ of Corbyn and Corbynism:

Summary

‘THE POLITICAL BOOK OF THE YEAR’ Tim Shipman

A blistering narrative exposé of infighting, skulduggery and chaos in Corbyn’s Labour party, now revised and updated.

* A Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times and i Newspaper Book of the Year *

Left Out tells, for the first time, the astonishing full story of Labour’s recent transformation and historic defeat.

Drawing on unrivalled access, this blistering exposé moves from the peak of Jeremy Corbyn’s popularity and the shock hung parliament of 2017 to Labour’s humbling in 2019 and the election of Keir Starmer. It reveals a party at war with itself, and puts the reader in the room as tensions boil over, sworn enemies forge unlikely alliances and lifelong friendships are tested to breaking point.

This is the ultimate account of the greatest experiment seen in British politics for a generation.

‘Gripping… Every bit as good as people say’ Guardian

‘Reads like a thriller…told with panache and pace’ Financial Times

‘The definitive post-mortem of the Corbyn project’ Sunday Times

…

Reviews

• A stunningly good book with jaw-dropping revelations on every page, Left Out is the ultimate inside story of how Jeremy Corbyn went from the brink of victory to one of the worst defeats in British political history. It is both a breath-taking work of political journalism and a gripping first draft of history that is unlikely ever to be bettered. Unquestionably the political book of the year

TIM SHIPMAN, author of All Out War

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442223/left-out-by-gabriel-pogrund-and-patrick-maguire/9781529113624

The incestious character of the Anti-Corbyn hysterics.

Briefings seldom come as lurid. At least not when they concern Jeremy Corbyn and emanate from the heart of Sir Keir Starmer’s office, where caution and message discipline are valued above all else. The hard left had got the band back together, said a breathless Labour official: Corbyn’s closest aides had reunited in the office of Lutfur Rahman, the mayor of Tower Hamlets, forming an ensemble cast of Team Starmer’s pantomime villains.

Banned from politics for five years after his conviction for corrupt electoral practices in 2015, Rahman returned to haunt his former party last year. Free once more to stand in his east London fiefdom, he beat Labour and reclaimed the mayoralty denied to him by the courts. Now, this senior party official said, the Corbynites plan to repeat the trick.

Seumas Milne, the Guardian columnist turned spin doctor; James Schneider, once Milne’s deputy; Amy Jackson, the former leader’s political secretary; Andrew and Laura Murray, the father and daughter who advised Corbyn. All were apparently ensconced in Rahman’s office, planning the Corbyn comeback: an audacious run for London mayor against Labour’s Sadiq Khan.

Little wonder an aide to Starmer should paint such a picture so vividly. Here, in Westminster, is the dutiful Starmer, preparing Labour for government and atoning for the sins of his predecessor. And there, in the lair of a disgraced populist, is the Corbynite cabal responsible for Labour’s worst ever defeat, plotting to undermine the party they left in ruins. With this political morality tale, asserted confidently as fact, there was only one problem: not a word of it was true. But like all horror stories, it reveals fears seldom acknowledged aloud and taboos rigidly enforced: in this case that the Corbynites are determined to derail Starmer’s leadership.

…

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jeremy-corbyn-could-start-a-new-party-does-he-have-the-friends-or-funds-zk7m0b7js

Patrick Maguire is the perfect Times defamer of Corbyn, to opine on the comic notion of ‘Starmer’s leadership’: being that Starmer is Tony Blairs political catamite. But Maguire has a mere 976 words left, to expatiate on Corbyn. How might The Reader approach this almost insightful comment, larded with a weak attempt at a pastiche of an exhumation of a ‘Psychoanalytic Methodology’?, demonstrating the utter weakness of his presented claims?

His true ambitions are more modest but no less significant. As The Times revealed this week, Corbyn has resolved after months of deliberation to run against the Labour Party in the seat he has won comfortably at ten general elections over 40 years. Stubborn by disposition and infuriated by his successor’s diktat against his candidacy, Corbyn was always likelier than not to choose defiance and potential martyrdom over acquiescence with Starmer’s mission to rewrite the rules of Labour politics and cast him as a villain. As another source familiar with the former leader’s thinking said: “It’s become personal.” Even before Starmer’s decision Corbyn had released a video, uncannily shot in the style of a party political broadcast, in which he gladhanded constituents and trumpeted his record of local activism. He believes he can win.

Corbyn’s electability has been proven over time, for the House of Commons, yet:

So Corbyn will fight on, isolated from the handful of MPs still loyal to the politics Starmer is determined to expunge. One question, however, is still outstanding: whether Corbyn will pitch himself as a reluctant victim of the Labour establishment, running to give a voice to local members denied the right to vote for him — as Ken Livingstone so successfully did when blocked from running for London mayor by Tony Blair in 2000 — or set up a new party entirely.

Hotter heads in his inner circle believe he could easily do so with the Peace and Justice Project, the campaign Corbyn set up in the weeks after his initial suspension in the winter of 2020 with patrons including Ken Loach, the former Bolivian president Evo Morales and the rapper Lowkey. “They’ve denied it for three years,” one former adviser to Corbyn said. “But Peace and Justice was always going to become a party.” Len McCluskey, the former general secretary of Unite, is among those who have privately urged the creation of a new movement. Friends questioned his seriousness until he tweeted on Tuesday: “I urge comrades to join the Peace and Justice Project.” Doubters worry that it is doomed to fail without cash from left-wing unions still affiliated to Labour, particularly if its ambitions stretch beyond north London.

On one crucial question, however, this most dysfunctional of socialist families is agreed: Corbyn will not back down now, no matter how many of his friends put their own futures first. “Our message is clear,” Corbyn said this week. “We are not going anywhere.” Trapped in a party determined to purge them, his old comrades are quietly saying the same thing.

While not just carefully avoiding ‘The Labour Files – The Crisis I Al Jazeera Investigations’ , that eviserated the ‘Corbyn Anti-Semitism Scandal’: that involves the whole of British Corporate Media. That ‘Centrist Neo-Liberalism’ of both the Tories and New Labour, defines ‘political rationalism’?: Corbyn acts the part of the toxic outsider, to the virtuous insiders of that ‘Centrist Neo-Liberalism’. So the cadre of Patrick Maguire, Dominic Sandbrook, Tom Bower, and many others, in various ‘respectable’ Newspapers and their journalists: lying by calculated omission, has become the sine qua non of these ‘Centrists’ , who will write a History Made to Measure, featuring an utterly irrational Corbyn?

Political Observer

Almost Marx views the unfolding ‘French Political Melodrama’, through the Matthieu Goar lens…

Headline: The pension crisis signals the end of ‘original Macronism’

Sub-headline: Some of the French president’s voters are beginning to doubt his ability to emerge from the current situation. They lament the disappearance of the Macron of 2017, and his reformist spirit and ability to overcome divisions.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2023/03/29/the-pension-crisis-signals-the-end-of-original-macronism_6021055_5.html

The Reader confronts this Macron apologetic wondering …

September 2022. Emmanuel Macron had been re-elected several months previously, but his second term had still not gotten off the ground. His supporters in Parliament had spent the summer finding ways to stem the decline in purchasing power, and his ministers talked about energy conservation as winter approached. But no one really knew what the re-elected president wanted to do with his five-year term, apart from managing crises. One of his advisors, between two coffees near the Elysée, raised his hand and mimed a dive bomber: “The pension reform, it mimed a dive bomber, enter the atmosphere like that.” It was as if the main proposal of Macron’s presidential campaign was going mimed a dive bomber, to dispel the doubts and the clouds that hung over this second term.

This Reader calls this an apologetic of a Le Monde kind.

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A collection of his catch phrases: of ‘still not gotten off the ground’, ‘ways to stem the decline’, ‘energy conservation as winter approached’ , ‘ apart from managing crises’, ‘mimed a dive bomber’, ‘mimed a dive bomber’ , ‘the clouds that hung over this second term’

The Goar preliminary diagnosis?

In the spring of 2023, the pension reform did come “hurtling.” But it has not put Macronism back on track, nor his second term. The social and political situation is both paralyzed – a 10^th day of national action took place on Tuesday, March 28 – and volatile, with increasingly violent clashes between the security forces and some protesters.

Like a cluster bomb, the reform has, above all, shattered the last hopes of “original Macronism,” to use the expression of Richard Ferrand, former president of the Assemblée Nationale (2018-2022). The Macron of 2017 dreamed of a systemic reform of pensions; the Macron of 2022 stalled on a parametric and budgetary reform. The former minister of the economy promised disruption by seeking out women and men of substance from all political backgrounds; he has failed for weeks to convince some 40 right-wing MPs to vote for his reform and finds himself facing a fragmented Parliament. The 2017 candidate wrote his book Révolution (2016) to give hope to the disappointed members of the “old parties,” to the young, and to the abstentionists; now he is forced to resort to Article 49.3 of the Constitution to force through the reform without a vote.

More selective ‘catch phrases’: ‘the pension reform did come “hurtling.”, ‘increasingly violent clashes between the security forces and some protesters.’, ‘shattered the last hopes of “original Macronism’, ‘The Macron of 2017 dreamed of a systemic reform of pensions’, ‘the economy promised disruption by seeking out women and men of substance from all political backgrounds’, ‘wrote his book Révolution (2016) to give hope to the disappointed members of the “old parties’, ‘to the abstentionists’ , ‘he is forced to resort to Article 49.3 of the Constitution to force through the reform without a vote’,

Following this, I’ll use Mr. Mr. Goar’s subheadings, in my self-serving skeletal form:

‘An immature leadership’

It is as if the pension reform has made official the sidelining of Macronism, as was already perceptible during his first term in office, with a clear shift right during the 2019 European elections.

…

This consequence of the pension reform is causing despair among his long-time followers. It worries the remaining left-wing ministers and MPs of the presidential camp who never abandoned the president throughout his first term. They admired his political intuition, especially when he launched a “great national debate” in 2019 after the Yellow Vests crisis.

…

Since the onset of this new crisis, which is causing him to drop in the polls, some advisers have been clinging to the fact that between 25% and 30% of the population approves of his performance, a score similar to his result in the first round of the 2022 presidential election (27.85%).

(Editor: the resort to polling data is not a surprise!)

…

Bernard Sananès, president of the Elabe Institute, said, “The Yellow Vests came from working-class backgrounds and there were low-income pensioners on the traffic circles [where many protests occurred]. It was not necessarily his electorate. Today, he is facing French workers with, for example, two-thirds of executives opposed to the reform. This is the heart of Macronism. In 2017, he had not benefited from the honeymoon period, but there was a reformist momentum. In 2022, there was neither the one nor the other.”

Macron reminds every French person of their boss’

…

“We are in a critical moment where anything can happen. The French no longer believe in politics. The crisis goes beyond the question of pensions and calls for a democratic reset,” said Gilles Le Gendre, MP for Macron’s Renaissance. “Only the president can succeed. With one condition: His sincerity cannot be questioned. He must therefore take a step back and entrust current affairs to a solid government.”

…

While waiting for this eventual rebound, the liberal English-language press, which admired Macron in 2017 before becoming more critical of this “French president,” mimicking certain Bonapartist tendencies, is now observing his apathy with circumspection. In an article published on March 24, the Financial Times sarcastically commented on the situation in Paris: “the metro is becoming a theoretical concept, while rats pick through heaps of uncollected garbage.” “Since Macron became president in 2017, popular anger has targeted him,” summed up Simon Kuper in the British daily. “Macron reminds every French person of their boss: an educated know-it-all who looks down on his staff (…) He cast himself as ‘Jupiterian’; but most voters just saw a jumped-up little ex-banker dressing up as king.”

(Editor: I had to laugh at this linking to the Neo-Liberal @FT , and Simon Kuper one of it’s lesser propagandists.)

By electing him over far-right politician Marine Le Pen, the French didn’t vote for his pension reform but to avoid “the devil,” Kuper argues. He believes that the president, a man who likes challenges, could be the man for the job if he set about renovating the Fifth Republic or changing the Constitution. It remains to be seen whether he still has the political fuel to get out of the trap he himself has created.

Matthieu Goar fails to confront Macron’s failed Neo-Liberal Project, under the apologetic descriptor of ‘original Macronism’. The French Middle Class confronts what the gilets jaunes knew all along!

Almost Marx

Queer Atheist comments.

Headline: What It Means to Be Woke

The first paragraph of Douthat’s essay is revelatory:

This week the conservative writer Bethany Mandel had the kind of moment that can happen to anyone who talks in public for a living: While promoting a new book critiquing progressivism, she was asked to define the term “woke” by an interviewer — a reasonable question, but one that made her brain freeze and her words stumble. The viral clip, in turn, yielded an outpouring of arguments about the word itself: Can it be usefully defined? Is it just a right-wing pejorative? Is there any universally accepted label for what it’s trying to describe?

Douthat offers the notion of ‘brain freeze’ as a would be defence of Mandal’s ignorance. Yet the OED offer this definition from 2008:

woke adjective earlier than 2008

View OED entry

#staywoke. In the last few years, the injunction to ‘stay woke’ in the face of racial discrimination or social injustice has ensured that woke, an originally African-American variant of woken or awake, has received wide currency and considerable attention. Woke was among the candidates for Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2016, when its development and usage were explored by Nicole Holliday for the OxfordWords Blog. The OED is currently seeking any contextual evidence (i.e. not from a glossary or definition) of woke meaning ‘well informed’ or ‘alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’ that dates from earlier than 2008.

Although first recorded in the nineteenth century in the literal sense of ‘awake, not (or no longer) asleep’, figurative use of woke has been traced back to 1962 in a glossary of ‘phrases and words you might hear today in Harlem’. This glossary accompanies a New York Times article titled ‘If you’re woke, you dig it’ by novelist William Melvin Kelley. In it he discusses the constantly shifting street slang used in urban African-American communities and provides the following definition of woke:

Well-informed, up-to-date, (‘Man, I’m woke’).

1962 New York Times Magazine, 20 May, pg. 45

Despite this mid-twentieth century origin, contextual evidence has been difficult to find. The only twentieth-century example we have located is in an extended metaphor from a 1972 play by Barry Beckham that, seemingly by coincidence, anticipates the word’s later use in racial and social contexts:

I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I’m gon stay woke. And I’m gon help him wake up other black folk.

1972 Barry Beckham, Garvey Lives, prologue, pg. 1

Further contextual evidence next appears in 2008, when American singer-songwriter Erykah Badu used the words ‘I stay woke’ as a refrain to her song Master Teacher. In more recent years it has been particularly associated with the activism of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Because it began existence as a slang term that was more likely to be spoken than written, finding early examples of woke could require consulting unusual sources like transcripts, personal letters, pamphlets, or signs. As mentioned, we are particularly interested in identifying contextual examples in the sense of ‘up-to-date, aware’ or ‘alert to racial and social injustice’ from prior to 2008, but any evidence (even glossarial) earlier than 1962 would help us to enrich the word’s entry in the OED Online.

Can you help us find earlier evidence of woke?

Posted by OED_Editor on 25 June 2017 15.53

Tags: 1960s, 2000s, North American, slang

This might have been the beginning point, on which to start a conversation about ‘woke’. But Mandel seems more concerned about her ignorance being on public display.

Not to forget, that ‘woke’ has become a dismissive epithet, to characterize thoughts, opinions, politics, sexual orientation, gender identity etc. , etc. as beyond the pale of respectable bourgeois discourse. Undeterred Mr. Douthat chatters on, presenting his own essay as a source:

Headline: The Religious Roots of a New Progressive Era

Sub-headline: Welcome to the post-Protestant Reformation.

Queer Atheist

Old Socialist comments

Headline: SVB’s European Shockwaves Silicon Valley Brings Disruption to Global Finance

Sub-headline: Rising interest rates have plunged the financial markets into turbulence. Regional banks in the U.S. are facing bank runs while in Europe, Credit Suisse is on the brink. Is a new global financial crisis coming?

By Tim Bartz und Michael Brächer

17.03.2023, 17.46 Uhr

…

It all began a week ago with the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in California, a financial institution known in the startup scene, but which most average investors had never heard of before. The bank experienced rapid growth in recent years, but completely misjudged the consequences of the recent interest rate increases and was facing collapse as its panicked clients rushed to empty their accounts

Following a series of emergency meetings, American financial authorities were forced to do something a number of regulatory and liquidation provisions had been designed to prevent: rescue a bank with government help.

Shortly afterward, U.S. President Joe Biden spoke to the country: “Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe,” he said on Monday. “Your deposits will be there when you need them.”

Despite Biden’s efforts, though, stock markets around the world plunged this week, with bank shares bearing the brunt of the slaughter. Investor trust eroded by the minute, and even German financial institutions, like Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, saw their stock prices temporarily plummet into the abyss.

They were statements reminiscent of pledges made by other leaders during the last crisis. Then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel told her compatriots: “Your savings are secure.” Mario Draghi, Lagarde’s predecessor at the ECB, was even more dramatic: “Whatever it takes,” were his words.

The situation at Credit Suisse then provided the cherry on top of this troublesome week. For years, the Swiss bank has been stumbling from one homemade scandal to the next. Once a beacon of the Alpine banking industry, the institution burned through billions with bad investments in addition to providing financial services to corrupt politicians, war criminals, human traffickers and drug dealers. In the fourth quarter of 2022 alone, wealthy and concerned clients withdrew 107 billion francs from the financial institution. The exodus has continued this year.

…

https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/svb-s-european-shockwaves-silicon-valley-brings-disruption-to-global-finance-a-5ec8b93d-b3be-44d7-9968-8a54d83051eb?sara_ecid=nl_upd_1jtzCCtmxpVo9GAZr2b4X8GquyeAc9&nlid=spiegel-international-21-00

The reader need only look to Gerald D. Suttles, with Mark D. Jacobs ‘Front Page Economics’ of 2010, for a critical analysis, that is not just a relevant history of 1929, 1987, 2008, but of the Political/Economic present!

Old Socialist